Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general

By James Fallows

Ten days ago I was writing a dispatch about Barack Obama's speech in Cairo, when the internet service where I was (in Shaanxi) cut out. The elections in Iran and general question of political change in the Middle East are a topical reminder to get back to this point:

As I started to say earlier, here is a way to think about why Barack Obama's "big" speeches of the past 15 months seem different from normal political rhetoric. It's because they are.

Here are the ones I'm counting as big speeches, starting with the most recent and working backward:

I'm not even counting convention speeches, the inaugural address, his State of the Union, or a bunch of other performances. They were all fine but more like other, normal "good" political speeches.

These six -- including an astonishing five of them in an eight-week burst -- were different from normal rhetoric in the following basic way:

Most of the time, "effective" speeches boil down to finding a better, clearer, cleverer, more vivid, or more memorable way to express what people already think.

The point is probably clearest by analogy to talk radio. People don't
listen to Rush Limbaugh -- or, to be "fair" about it, Keith Olbermann
in his freshest phase -- to change their political ideas. They want new
fuel, new riffs, new outrages. Most political speeches are doing a more
polite version of this: reinforcing what people think and, through
clearer expression, giving them new conviction in thinking it.

Figuring
out how to clarify, express, and even poeticize people's existing views
is no trivial achievement. Ronald Reagan gave conservatives new
images and languages for expressing their views. Teddy Kennedy has
often done so for liberals. George Wallace, in his heyday, for
segregationists. You can tell that a speech is in this category when
the crowd response is on the lines of "That's right!" Or "You, tell
'em!" or a rapid leap to the feet to cheer. Campaign speeches naturally
have a very high quotient of this kind of rhetoric. Most of the time in
a campaign, the main goal is to rally and motivate your side, as
opposed to changing minds on the other side. So even in Obama's case,
most of his campaign rhetoric was reinforcing and revving up: "Yes we
can!" "That's change we can believe in." "Not Red states and Blue
states but the United States..." Etc.

That's why the speeches
above, with one exception, are all from his period as a sitting
president rather than as a candidate. The exception was his
Philadelphia speech about race, which was less a normal campaign speech
than a command-performance, save-the-campaign attempt to change the
concept of "race" through which (mostly white) people saw the candidacy of the
first non-white politician with a serious chance at the presidency.

What
Obama did in that speech is what he has done, or attempted to do, in
those subsequent five big speeches as president. Rather than simply
reaffirming or reinforcing what much of the public already thinks; and
rather than attempting the relatively common political feat of
explaining small changes or compromises in policy; he has tried to
change the basic way in which we think about large issues. You can look
back on his 2004 Democratic convention speech, given before he'd even
been elected to the Senate, as a preview of this approach. By 2008,
"not Red states or Blue states..." had become a mere catch phrase. In 2004,
during the embittered Bush-Kerry campaign, it was something like a new
idea. That's what got him such a response in the convention hall (I was
there; it was electrifying), and extensions of that approach are what
make his big speeches these days seem different from what we generally
hear.

If political speeches typically sound "hazy," the reason
is that most of the the time excess clarity brings risks. As a
journalistic or literary writer, your goal is to make your meaning
absolutely as clear as it can possibly be. In political rhetoric, most of the
time you want to clarify views only to the extent that most people will
still agree. (Yes, we all agree on "protecting the environment" and
"keeping the nation safe." So you talk about that, not the more
controversial specifics.) Obama's big speeches sound unusual because
he's often being quite clear (eg, talking about his white grandmother's
view of black people) en route to introducing new "frames" or approaches to basic questions.

I'm not saying that all his plans are going to work. I'm not saying that his big set-piece speeches are cliche-free. As argued earlier,
often they're not even that "well written," in a fancy-phrasemaking
sense. I am saying: there's a reason they seem similar as a group and
different from normal political rhetoric. The difference is, they're
asking us to change our minds.